Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Robert Feintuch: This week's featured artist!

Robert Feintuch

Robert Feintuch, who lives and works in New York, has shown his work nationally and internationally. He is a Senior Lecturer at Bates College in Maine where he teaches painting drawing and senior thesis courses. He received his BFA from Cooper Union and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. Feintuch is a recipient of the 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to Assist Research and Artistic Creation, the Leube Foundation Fellowship in Austria, the Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship in Italy, as well as a Mellon Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship.

Recently Robert Feintuch has changed his New York representation from CRC Gallery to Sonnabend gallery, a notable career move. Robert Feintuch continues to be represented in Boston by Howard Yezerski Gallery.

Tomorrow night Thursday, October 7at 7:00pm Feintuch will be giving an Artist's Talk at the School of Visual Arts Amphitheatre, at 209 E. 23rdStreet, on the 3rdfloor.

Cro-Magnon, 2005, oil polymer emulsion and pencil on canvas, 10' x 8'

Feintuch works in polymer emulsion and casein on honeycomb panels which gives his paintings a luminous, fresco-like surface. His unusual self-portraits depict himself caught in ridiculous situations that are reminiscent of cartoons or slapstick. In others he is seen from an unconventionally intimate viewpoint, asleep, with his back turned, exposed and vulnerable. Many of these images could be moments in a narrative sequence selected from quotidian, lived life. But the cropping and the stillness of the compositions, and luminosity of the color and light, make it clear that the images are metaphorically open and psychologically suggestive. These images deal with the transitory nature of experience, that which typically passes unnoticed. But when Feintuch stops it short, it makes for paintings that are simultaneously comic, serious and quietly monumental.

Sunset (3), 2003. Polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel, 34'' x 42.5''

Feintuch’s figurative paintings are part of an intermittent but continuing series of self-portraits that spans about ten years and functions both as autobiography and in broader metaphorical terms. Inspired by images from cartoons, photographs, and films, but firmly rooted in reality, the paintings deal with the transitory nature of experience, that which usually passes unnoticed. The intimate viewpoints and cropping, along with the "stillness of the compositions and the luminosity of color create an ongoing narrative sequence which is at once comic, serious", and quietly monumental.

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Howard Yezerski Gallery is a leading contemporary art gallery in Boston specializing in painting, photography and sculpture. We represent emerging and established artists that are both local and international. Howard Yezerski Gallery has been a vital member of the Boston art community since the 1980s.
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